The second ambusher was invisible, his image blotted out of the Noösphere like a phantasm, replaced with computer extrapolations of what should be there had he been absent. The only thing that gave him away was the odd light from Wormwood, which was not steady and red like the light from Iota Draconis. The extrapolation had to anticipate the wavering and rippling shadows from the light reflecting from the storm layers in the upper Wormwood atmosphere, and this called on more computer time, and so a man-shaped blankness in the computer images of the alleyway had a higher computer-use rate than its profile could account for.

The third was disguised as a horse and cart, with a dog as a driver snapping a whip, and other dogs yipping and barking about the cart wheels while the horse reared and plunged and kicked. The wheels did not seem to be ordinary wheels at all, not temporary city wheels, but older, larger, wiser-looking wheels from the desert outlands, and each one had a sly and cold expression in the eye of his hub.

Vigil would not have noticed this third assassin, except that the driver, a Mastiff, was whirling and cracking his whip and uttering curses with gusto, but these curses were like something from a peddler’s story, a yarn a wandering tinker might sell to children in their dreams. The motions were fake looking, too well coordinated, for none of the unruly pack blocking the cart was being struck by the whip or flying hoof. The assassin was not really trying to hurt one of the bodies he inhabited with another. Besides, during a citywide carnival, when all street priorities were reversed, what teamster was so eager to move his dray goods that he would try to force his way through a celebrating pack of dogs?

Made nervous by how cunningly the third ambusher had disguised himself as a horse and dog pack, Vigil made a more careful inspection of the environment, both physical and electronic. Only then did a sudden disturbance in his internal creatures show him the fourth killer.

The fourth was not physical at all, but occupied a heavy-duty node in the pornography lines buried underneath the road, where the citywide information scrubbers were set to carry away records of evil thoughts and desires for psychological cleansing and recycling. It was a line that was normally shielded, and a fastidious man like Vigil normally would not paw through the nauseating garbage of other men’s discarded erotic thought-spew, but there were lines of memory and association leading into the sewer mess which looked like lines used for controlling a weapon.

He could not see the weapon. He only sensed the volume of data used for control and command processes, so he knew it was large, weighing about a ton. It was physical rather than informational, something that would bash his skull or lacerate his flesh rather than meddle with thought or perception.

From the information contour, the weapon was not chemical and not nanotechnological, and so it was technically inside what the Patricians permitted for automated death instruments. But what was it? He could not tell from seeing the thought-streams controlling it, because it did not fit any of the patterns he, or the Archangel of Bloodroot (whom he queried), recognized. It was an old command pattern. But from what nation of what world in what era long forgotten even Vigil the antiquarian could not say. The number of colonies planted was higher than the number of colonies that survived, and the history of off-world man reached back over sixty-eight thousand years.

And where was the weapon? Somewhere near, he knew. But there was no time and no information budget for a deeper scan of the area.

Vigil drew a breath, crossed himself, said a prayer, set his battle priorities, set his internal creatures to start selecting targets, spun the vendetta wand overhead, and ran toward the ambush with a shout on his lips.

The first and obvious choice was the scattered man. Vigil ran toward the medical slops can tucked in the weed-grown corner of the cobblestone alley, between a rain pipe leading down and an extraction pipe leading up, and almost before the ambushers knew their prey had found them, Vigil made the sign of Threatening Mudra, the tarjana, using an unusual left-handed stance, a fist with the index finger raised; next he tossed the wand from his right hand to his left, freeing his right hand to indicate harina, the Lion Gesture, thumb touching his second and third fingers, pinkie and index raised and crooked.

The result was immediate and startling: the scattered man, instead of abandoning the several parts of his body when their communication channels were jammed, pulled his limbs and organs from the various hiding places under eaves and springbird nests and streetlamps and ego slots together in one ugly mass of flesh. It looked like a shoal of fish, ruby red with blood, trying to form itself into a man’s shape.

The smell was vile; the sight was grotesque and mysterious. Vigil could not see how the body parts were moving through the air.

At the same time, the cart horse reared up, broke his traces, and fell forward onto the pavement, dead. The pack of dogs scattered, some howling insanely, fleeing and puking blood. Some ran a dozen steps and collapsed; others continued running and escaped. The teamster himself toppled headlong from the driver’s bench. His skull exploded outward as if from inner pressure.

Vigil was startled. He was expecting the scattered man to fall and the horse to charge, because the scattered man looked like a decentralized formation and the horse looked like savantry, a matter of brain download. Instead, the horse had been delocalized in the ether, and the man, one organism. The scattered man was something he had not seen before; a man with independent body parts, one part each given to one internal creature. He was like something from the legends of undead volcanoscapes and elfin sand dunes in nameless, nonconformist parishes beyond the Southeast, where lawless fauna thrived, programmed to survive any environment, no matter how dry, or to endure the plutonian winter.

The invisible figure was visible to his eyes, of course, wearing the wide-brimmed hat and ankle-length cloak, sand goggles and moisture veil of a Nomad from the small-crater prairie region of the Southeast, beyond the reach of the last canal. From the slight stature, the breathing pattern, and the set of the shoulders, Vigil could see it was a Nomadess, a woman of the Nomad race. In her hands was a breaching tool called a Halligan bar, with a fork at one end and an adze at the other. Not legally considered a weapon, it was ignored by most security protocols. The Nomadess had added an extender bar between two mating points, making the thing practically a pike.

She sublimated her goggles and veil so they disappeared into long streaks of light to the left and right. Beneath she was a Fox Maiden, or rather she wore a living mask that closely mimicked Fox Maiden features. This was a trick from a peddler’s tale, which should not have worked in real life, but Vigil felt the neural channels in his head leading to specific strikes and blows and battle reflexes jar themselves into stillness, as if paralyzed by the ancient instinctual rule preventing lesser races from harming foxes.

But no—he blinked, and in the afterimages, he saw that the goggles and veil, during the moment when they evaporated, had ignited to form a sketchy but legitimate mandala in midair—little more than a circle within a square—indicating Samadhi, or mental stability. That was what had actually frozen his impulses—that, and his unwillingness to strike an unmodified woman. It was a clever two-leveled deception.

Therefore, he stood stupidly, motionless, when she flourished the Halligan bar and it telescoped open at the speed of sound, making a crack like a whip, slamming into and through Vigil’s chest. The adze, covered in blood, emerged four inches from his back.